The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

A new arms race

Recently, the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said we were living in dangerous times. This was echoed by the new American Secretary of State for Defence, Pete Hegseth. I would have said this was the usual exaggeration which the Donald Trump crowd is known for. But coming from the British prime minister, one cannot simply dismiss it because this was a preambular statement to the launching of a new British defence and strategic review document which is going to increase Britain’s defence spending to 3% of the country’s GDP.

This will be well above the current 2% and moving on to 2.5%, still way below the 5% president Donald Trump is demanding from all NATO member countries, even though the current amount the USA is spending is $895 billion, just about 3.4%of its GDP, which is way above the current expenditure on defence by the next three countries of China, $266.85 billion, Russia $126 billion, and India, which comes fourth with an expenditure of $75 billion.

From these figures it can be seen that the USA alone spends more than the next three countries combined. The British prime minister’s statement was further explained by the Secretary of State for Defence , Right Honourable John Healey, who claimed that his country aims to build about eleven attack submarines, expand the carrying capacity of the British navy and reinvigorate the airforce by buying additional American-built F35, and increase the number of British-built typhoon aircrafts, and start recruiting people into the fighting force of the army, while keeping the current men and women happy by improving their accommodation and stipends. All these coming from a socialist government, which traditionally preferred to spend money on social services, indicate that its analysis on threat to the realm is serious.

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This, of course, should be taken in the context of the NATO members’ feeling about the unreliability of the USA as a partner because of the statements of President Donald Trump who has, perhaps rightly, been saying that American defence partners must share the burden of defence, and not expect America to carry their burden as it used to do hitherto.

This sharing of burden on defence extends not only to NATO members alone, but to Japan and South Korea, and to the rich Arab oil kingdoms, but not to Israel where the Israeli tail wags the American dog! As at the moment, Trump is prepared to fight the Israeli war against Iran and to possibly level the Persian theocracy down unless it kowtows to Israeli diktat and abandons its nuclear programme.

The current doctrine of expanding defence spending has also been embraced by the new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who has publicly committed his country to go beyond 3% of GDP from its current low of below 2%. Chancellor Merz has signed agreements with Ukraine to help it defend itself by building its own defence industry. The German posture on defence is influenced by President Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. For reasons of the big powers guarantee of Germany’s permanent disarmament, the Germans would probably have built their own nuclear arsenal, which they are capable of doing and have the know-how.

The current aggression of Russia in Ukraine has led to President Macron’s signing defence agreements with Poland in addition to the European Union’s opposition to the Russian threat. All these coming after Donald Trump’s bluff has not impressed President Putin, and it seems the Europeans are determined to defend themselves, with or without American support. Coordination of British, French and German preparedness to defend their interests on the continent of Europe, and their threat to seize accumulated Russian assets and investments in Europe, may eventually force President Putin to count the cost of his policy of rebuilding the lost Russian empire and the reconstruction of the collapsed USSR.

Recently, the security conference in Singapore, which the Chinese virtually ignored by sending a low-ranking delegation to, witnessed the campaign of rearmament carried to their door step, with President Macron delivering the keynote address and offering France’s support in the defence of democracy, defence and development for countries in South East Asia, and warning those countries of the need to be prepared to defend their country’s autonomy. He also called on China to prevail on North Korea’s continued intervention on the Russian side in the current war between Russia and Ukraine on the European continent.

The American Secretary of State, Pete Hegseth, was less diplomatic as characteristic of American “open diplomacy, “established since the time of President Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War, by openly accusing China of threatening Taiwan and the Philippines, and calling on countries in Asia to be ready to resist Chinese communist threats by increasing their arms spending. He gave the impression that America is prepared to defend Taiwan, which is against President Trump’s campaign statement that he would not commit American troops to the defence of Taiwan. The Japanese and the South Koreans were not openly attacking China. Japan, in recent times, seems to have abandoned its pacific policy to a policy of armed neutrality in Asia, but ready to protect the Japanese homeland.

In the first Trump administration, the Japanese were publicly goaded to develop their own nuclear umbrella. The Japanese did not publicly state their position, apart from saying the American – Japanese treaty of defence was sufficient. My guess is that the Chinese do not have expansionist ambitions on the Philippines except to contest fishing rights on disputed islands in the South China Sea, and Vietnam is capable of resisting Chinese ambitions. As for Taiwan, the eventual unification with the mainland is a foregone conclusion, with or without America acquiescence.

To make the new arms race palatable to the suffering electorate in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, politicians are now talking of a new concept of “DEFENCE DIVIDENDS,” meaning with expansion of defence industries in their neighbourhood, jobs will be created for working-class people who can either enlist in the armed forces or work in arms industries. The idea of defence dividends is not strange because when a country’s economy is put on war footing, there seems to be the appearance of full employment, which is a false prosperity against which the post Second World war American president and previous Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, David Dwight Eisenhower, warned against when he advised his country against being taken over by the “military industrial complex. “

There is, however, no doubt, that there is a growing hysteria about the possibility of an outbreak of war in Europe, and the rest of us cannot just ignore it because of our distance from the current theatre of the conflict in Eastern Europe. However, we can hope that, like all other regional wars of the past, since 1945, the Russian war in Ukraine will be contained because its spread and development into a nuclear confrontation is just too ghastly to be imagined.

June 5, 2025
The fire next door

There are truths that are better said untempered: that nobody savours the bitter taste of the herbs we season for others. That hate looks like other people’s torment until it pulses at our doorsteps. This much is affirmed by the reactions to the sad fates of Apesuur Ukechia and Ward Halil.

On a Sunday morning, just after church, Apesuur Ukechia watched her world vanish. Not in a metaphorical sense. Her husband and three children, the centre of her 27-year marriage and dreamscape of her future, were gunned down by herdsmen on the native soil of Aondona, in Gwer West, Benue State. Months before, the same assailants killed her parents and all of her siblings. Now, widowed, childless, alone, and homeless, Ukechia breathes the air of the living but pines for the company of the dead.

Ukechia’s loss is unacceptable, yet, no more pitiable than Ward Khalil’s. The harrowing video of the young Palestinian girl trying to escape the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School shelter in Gaza City that had been incinerated by a deadly overnight Israeli airstrike, circulated widely on social media on Monday. Khalil ambled through the flames, her silhouette a ghost of a grisly genocide. Her five siblings, aged two to eighteen, along with their mother, died in the flames. Her father and one surviving brother remain in critical condition. “I was scared of the fire,”a teary Khalil told journalists. But what language does a five-year-old girl have for her family’s massacre?

Some Nigerians, in reaction to Ukechia’s loss, accused the government for allowing the culprits roam free. They made a radical call to arms, urging every community hosting northerners to “evict them before they kill us all and take over our lands.”

Reacting to Khalil’s loss, these same anarchists described her as “collateral damage.” The tenor of reactions ranged from “Her people started it on October 7, now they must live with the consequences” to “Serves them right! Next time, they won’t attack God’s chosen.”

In another forum, some academics dismissed a video of Zionist-Jews attacking Christian pilgrims in Israel, claiming it’s their divinely-ordained duty to kill every Christian because they are “idol worshipers.” They answered with silence and refused to condemn the attack and the genocidal campaign in Palestine. “It’s a hard decision that must be taken,” said an esteemed Professor.

These random reactions mirror a world increasingly defined by pitilessness. And no country has made that descent into moral atrophy as casually and as completely as Nigeria. A massacre occurs in Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, Gaza, Southern Kaduna, or the West Bank, and the nation erupts into a paroxysm of digital grief. Hashtags bloom. Performative laments flood social media, teary op-eds rise like smoke from newspaper editorial pages. But five days later, or seven at the most, dawns the silence. Not solemnity. Disconcerting quiet. A shriveling of collective attention. Then, almost as if rehearsed, begins the rite of forgetting.

This forgetting is an act of violence in itself; a quiet, cowardly complicity that has become the familiar touchstone of carnage in Nigeria. It erases the dead twice: once by the bullet or the bomb, and again by the indifference of the living. The citizens who once held vigils, marched for peace, or wept for neighbours, now scroll past the news of massacres with deadened eyes, muttering “God forbid” as if prayer were a prophylactic against complicity.

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Lest we forget the heckling: It is painful to read acerbic posts by Nigerians, validating the genocide in Palestine while laying curses on Fulani militia accused of genocidal attacks in Nigeria, in same breadth.

Some truths are better said unfiltered: that the Nigerian public sphere pulses in prejudice to premeditated bigotries. Every bigot is complicit. Bigots in public and private places: bigots in medicine, bigots in engineering, bigots in law enforcement, bigots in education, and most disconcertingly, bigots in journalism. The latter rankles an ominous note. It casts those entrusted with the role of impartial watchdogs, as soulless, partisan perpetrators.

Nowhere is this heartlessness more evident than in the schizophrenic morality regarding Palestine. Even as over 61,709 Palestinians, including 17,492 children, have been killed in Gaza (as of February 3, 2025), and 14,222 are still buried under the rubble, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, many Nigerians, armed with half-baked theology and deeply embedded bigotry, cheer Israel’s military campaign with messianic zeal. “God’s chosen people,” they cry, thumbing through the scriptures for confirmation bias. They quote Psalms and Revelation to justify napalm and cheer as Palestinian babies burn.

They are impervious to correction, even as former defenders of Israel’s genocidal spree, like Piers Morgan, have since reversed course, calling the bombardments genocidal and unjust. Still, Nigerian evangelicals froth with righteous fury at the suggestion that Palestinians too, might be human.

This grotesque moral disfigurement is worsened by the Nigerian media and intellectual class. Where is the fire that once lit pages in condemnation of Russia’s assault on Ukraine? Then, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was exalted as a David against the Goliath of Moscow. But when the same script unfolded in Gaza, they changed the language. It is not “genocide,” it is “retaliation.” Not “massacre,” but “military operation.” Not “ethnic cleansing,” but “self-defense.”

When Israeli bombs flatten a Gaza orphanage, the pens fall silent and conveniently ignore how Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed and kept in an open air prison for over seven decades. The hypocrisy is stupefying. The duplicity, damning.

What happened to Ukechia’s family in Benue is evil. But it is no more evil than what happened to Ward Khalil’s family in Gaza. Pain is not a respecter of geography. Neither is justice. And when a people weep for one massacre but dance around another with prophetic glee, what remains of their humanity?

If a conflict of Palestinian-Israeli proportions erupts in Nigeria, the country will unravel. With a media so compromised, a citizenry so fanatical, and primed for blood, Nigeria would not survive.

We have seen hints of this future in the Hurti massacre. We saw it in Bokkos LGA where families were wiped out and entire villages decimated. Some were burned alive. Others had their throats slit. We saw it in every other place where ethnicity or religion was weaponised against the poor. These victims were all from communities straddling the poverty line. That is why their deaths remain unpaid debts in the national memory.

The horror is cyclical because the roots remain: unemployment, dead industries, crumbling infrastructure, and leaders who treat governance as theatre. Yet it is not too late. The fire is near, yes, tonguing our borders and threading through our cities. Yet this fire can be quenched.

First, we must unlearn our inherited hatreds. Nigeria must teach tolerance and compassion in its schools as earnestly as it teaches arithmetic. Interfaith and inter-ethnic dialogues must be institutionalised at state and federal levels. Traditional rulers must enter the public square with the moral courage of old. Clerics must re-teach their congregations that God is not a tribal chieftain, nor a licensed executioner. The press must rediscover its calling as the conscience of the nation, not the mouthpiece of genocidal apologists.

It’s about time we humanised each other again. This is the great task of our time: to learn to live together not as tribes or sects, but as people — fallible, flawed, but whose lives are sacred all the same.

To do otherwise is to become like those who murdered Ukechia’s family. Or Khalil’s. And that, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of all.

June 5, 2025
Mokwa; 21 youth; Adesina/AfDB; EXPO-WAEC

The terrible Mokwa, Niger State, flood claiming approximately 200 lives and 3,000 displaced, with much destruction, was complicated by a dam collapse. Just last year, a team examined all dams in Nigeria following a similar dam collapse. We presume the team was made up of engineers and technical staff and not politicians. What was the verdict then on the dam which collapsed just last week? Were any emergency measures taken to strengthen dams made vulnerable by age, abandoned maintenance or the added water volumes of climate change?

Maintenance saves lives. Underbudgeting, stealing or undercutting maintenance budgets has been a bane of governance since the colonialists handed over ‘maintenance’ as a main leg of government policy. Our civil servants and politicians hate ‘maintenance strategies’ and constantly ask: ‘WHY MAINTAIN, REPAIR or REFURBISH?’ They prefer to allow the collapse of all infrastructure like dams, buildings, office content and roads under their supervision so as to illegally and criminally justify approval of criminally inflated contracts for ‘REPLACEMENT.’ This is why we mostly build the same colonial roads and bridges repeatedly, and not enough new roads and bridges in new directions.

Horrifyingly, a second set of youth die in a road crash, this time 21 Fellow Nigerian Youth, starry-eyed, victorious after years of teamwork and dawn-to-dusk painful and costly athletic training, discipline and self-denial. They were returning from the 2025 National Sports Festival held in Ogun State to Kano, having placed 17th with 1 Gold, 3 Silver and 6 Bronze medals. We don’t know if the medal winners died or survived, but that is not the point. The question is, was this a needless, senseless, totally preventable deadly disaster?

This accident, occurring just 40km to the destination, is barely 1-2wks after 10 students attending a competition in Lagos died in a road crash. One time is a mistake, twice is over-confidence or incompetence! Spare a prayer for the bereaved families. We must be told who or what was at fault, and exonerate the driver if he is innocent. However, if he or any other driver or road user is guilty or found wanting, then the law must take its course.

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Government drivers, instead of being exemplary, are well known for cutting corners, jumping traffic, blaring horns and using their taxpayer -paid security officials to terrify, torment and terrorise we taxpayers, considered lesser road-user status mortals, in order to ‘clear-the-road’ because of their ‘important cargo/passengers’ or ‘superior number plate’ or ‘government sign’ on their vehicle. It is unlikely that the Kano Sports Commission bus had any escort so the driver must be questioned, if he survived, as well as other sports commission officials, eyewitnesses among the survivors and other road users. Was ‘driver fatigue’ a factor?

Nigeria must thank and honour Dr Akinwumi Adesina, Nigeria’s shining agriculture, and now financial guru, and former Nigerian Minister of Agriculture, as he exits, in glory and triumph, the African Development Bank (AfDB), after, by all accounts, a meteoric 10 years at the helm of a bank he led to great reputational growth in available loan funds, and further cemented the strong foundations of the bank. Congratulations for keeping an unstained Nigerian reputation on the world stage and changing the focus of such a large bank in funding directions.

Exam malpractice, specifically the early release of the actual questions, again reared its ugly head in WAEC for N1,000-5,000/paper last month. ‘Expo’ was the name applied to it when we did WAEC in 1965, and some tried to cheat; so, sadly, it is nothing new. It is up to the student and parent to resist the temptation. To even ask for Expo is a criminal offence. Even if you are given a ‘fake expo’ for your money, you are still an exam cheat, something we considered to be very low on the scale of human morality.

Exam question papers are secret by definition. Any breach is not really the fault of the students, even if they offer money to buy the Expo. If the paper was not available for sale, no one would offer money for it. Exam Question Papers must remain secret from the point of choosing the question to exam time. In this case, it is always someone, or an embedded criminal syndicate within the WAEC echelons, or within the machinery of the printing cycle of exam papers, who is ‘Suspect’ 1. Such a person must be found by a high-powered police/administrative/ forensic investigation, including a document audit.

WAEC officials should be forced to overcome this recurring barrier to the integrity of an exam which takes 5 years to prepare for after primary school; and a dangerous probability of Expo resulting in devastatingly destabilising delay, cancellation and added cost to the students and WAEC agents throughout the country. The enormity of the burden on WAEC management is emphasised now, more than ever, as we have Nigerian 30+m primary school and almost 14m secondary school students in approximately 81,520 primary and 23,550 secondary schools (Source: Google search) all in the WAEC pipeline aspiring to sit; and previous WAEC students in addition planning to re-sit WAEC. Kudos must go to WAEC for a ‘ZERO EXPO’ in most subjects but even ‘ONE SUBJECT EXPO’ in a key subject like English is ‘WAEC ADMINISTRATIVE FAILURE’ even if it is external sabotage. 73-year-old WAEC must, like Caesar’s wife, be above board to its 1973,253 current customers – our student children and youth.

June 4, 2025
Critics of the midterm report

I was one of those who wondered why President Bola Ahmed Tinubu wanted to be Nigeria’s President in 2023, given all we knew then about the depressed state of the economy and the sheenanigans of Godwin Emefiele, then Governor of the Central Bank. My thinking then was simple: If Tinubu won and decided to focus on just one or two areas, such as electricity and infrastructure, and did extremely well, he would be accused of neglecting other sectors of the economy. Alternatively, if he chose to take every sector of the economy in stride for improvement, as he has been doing since inauguration, he would be accused of doing little or nothing at all, because virtually every sector was in shambles. That is where we are today. For example, only about 3,000MW of power was available for distribution when he assumed office in 2023. Today, double that amount (6,000MW) is being distributed. Yet, the difference is negligible because the base was too low to start with. That is the sad story of the entire economy.

Nevertheless, Tinubu’s midterm report has attracted more encouraging commendations from outside than from inside the country. External assessors, such as the World Bank, the IMF, and Moody’s ratings, are impressed by the economic outlook, based largely on possitive assessments of Tinubu’s economic policies and macro-economic outlook. While some internal economic-literates are also impressed with the macro-economic outlook, others focus on improvements in specific sectors, such as infrastructure and revenue generation.

However, there appears to be more condemnation than commendation for Tinubu’s midterm report at home. There are at least three major categories of negative critics of the report. They include (1) politicians, labour unions, and the elite; (2) the masses; and (3) the media. All the critics share two things in common—(1) they focus on microeconomic realities, typified by existential economic hardships anchored on high inflation and high cost of living, resulting from the removal of fuel subsidies and the harmonisation of foreign exchange, and (2) they fail to acknowledge that Tinubu commenced his administration on May 29, 2023, from a bankrupt economic base (briefly described below). Yet, that was the starting point for the external assessors, who saw major improvements to the base two years after restructuring the economy. It is, therefore, necessary to recall the economic base from which Tinubu started his administration in 2023 in order to properly situate reasonable assessments of his midterm report.

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A “dead economy”

On assumption of office, Tinubu inherited what a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and now Governor of Anambra State, Chuckwuma Soludo, described as a “dead economy”. It was typified by a $10 billion annual fuel subsidy; multiple foreign exchange rates floated by the Godwin Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria, which promoted arbitrage and speculations; and a total debt profile of N80 trillion (N50 trillion external borrowing and N30 trillion Ways and Means!). In addition, unspecified trillions of Naira was spent on subsiding electricity. Even the CBN owed foreign airlines over $7 billion. Then there were the CBN’s ill-conceived e-Naira programme and Naira swap policies, which led to Naira scarcity well into Tinubu’s administration.

Along the line, the nation’s foreign reserve was drastically reduced from about $15 billion in 2015, when former President Muhammadu Buhari took office, to just under $4 billion, when he left office in 2023. As a result of all these economic distortions and heavy borrowings, Buhari left office with a debt service-to-revenue ratio of 96%! His administration already knew that a first line of economic rescue was to remove fuel subsidy. He failed to do so but left it for the succeeding government, by removing fuel subsidy from the budget as from June 2023.

Renewed Hope Agenda

Tinubu designed the Renewed Hope Agenda precisely to pull the sunken ship of the economy out of deep waters. From Day 1, he removed fuel subsidy to free money that is now being shared across the states. This was immediately followed by the harmonisation of the foreign exchange market in order to remove multiple exchange rates and allow market forces to dictate the selling and buying rates. The two measures brought immediate hardships as one led to a hike in the price of petroleum products, while the other led to the devaluation of the Naira. True, two years on, the cost of living remains high, but stability is returning to the market. Fuel price is coming down. The exchange rate has stabilised. Prices are coming down gradually. Investor confidence has returned, leading, for example, to over $8 billion new investments in the oil sector.

But, then, Tinubu has taken other measures to free more money. Many sectors of the economy have been restructured and their records digitized for accountability, transparency, and efficiency. They include the oil sector, tax assessment and collection, marine and blue economy, and the mining sector. There is now more synergy between monetary and fiscal policies. These measures are producing positive results already. For example, in quarter 1, 2025, alone, government revenue increased to over N6 trillion. Debt service-to-revenue ratio has been reduced from 96% to under 40%. The Yemi Cardoso-led CBN has offset the bank’s debt to foreign airlines. External reserve has grown fom a mere $4 billion to over $23 billion.

What is more, Tinubu has laid the foundation for prosperity, by creating several funding options. There is the Consumer Credit Corporation for financing micro, small, and mediu-sized enterprises; the Nigerian Education Loan Fund for providing access to higher education through long-term loans; and the N100 billion National Agricultural Development Fund. He has also laid the foundation for transition to clean energy programmes, by investing in solar energy for homes and industries and compressed natural gas for transport vehicles.

Politicians, Labour Unions, and the Elite

It is disingenous at best and mischievous at worst for this category of critics to ignore the depressed economic base described above, and the administration’s effort to pull the nation out of the hole. Yet, politicians, labour leaders, and the elite, who should know better, play ignorance, by capitalising on the short-term negative effects of Tinubu’s economic policies. In the attempt to convince ignorant people to believe their distorted narratives, they ignored improvements in the overall economy.

The masses

Poverty, under- and unemployment, illiteracy, and rural dwelling have created a wide gulf between the masses and government programmes. As a result, the majority have no idea what is going on. In most cases, information trickles down to them from political bosses and social media. Unfortunately, it is often distorted information, usually tailored to the disseminators’ point of view. These are mostly bread and butter citizens, who are not impressed by macro-economic outlook, whatever that means. They are concerned about the here and now. To the extent that they still cannot make ends meet, to that extent has the government failed.

The media

Mainstream and social media in general sided with the masses in the coverage of the midterm report. It is their conception of the goal of keeping the government accountable. For most columnists, what the government does right is immaterial. The story is in what it fails to do. It is as if insecurity, poor education funding, frequent power outage, and other socioconomic ills started under Tinubu in 2023. He must fix them all within two years! Yet, we know too well that it takes time for reforms to take hold and for their effects to trickle down to the grassroots.

What should be done

That’s why more should be done to reach the masses and the media from now on through periodic but regular outreach programmes. The media needs regular briefings from government, while the masses need information beyond mainstream and social media. But they need the dividends of democracy even more, and in more concrete forms—skills acqusition, jobs, and various forms of social protection, possibly through channels beyond partisan politics.

June 4, 2025
The unending local government crisis

The local government crisis, like our other self-inflicted problems, remains intractable because our leaders often prefer playing the ostrich instead of confronting our own demons.

Let us start with the issue of the national question. When Oliver Stanley, for instance, in 1920, declared, “Our vision for Nigeria was a national self-government that secures to each separate people the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality, its own chosen form of government, which had been evolved for it by the wisdom and accumulated experiences of generation of its forbearers,” he spoke from experience.

The federal arrangement as a social system that guarantees unity in diversity was what ended centuries of tribal wars in Europe. Events after that speech confirmed that the golden age of our nation was between 1946 and 1966 when we practiced federalism.

But we cannot also pretend not to know the enemies of the federal arrangement that needed appeasement, especially after playing the leading role in the collapse of the First Republic and plunging the nation into an avoidable civil war.

Those who have continued to wage war against federalism are Fulani hegemonic rulers of the north who want to preserve Nigeria as home to stateless Fulani herders across West Africa, and their Igbo rival with identical worldview, who insist everywhere in Nigeria, except their Igbo nation, is home.

For those who have faith in our country, the cheapest way forward is returning to where the rain started to beat us. Unfortunately, for close to 60 years we have done everything, including the fruitless search for unity through social engineering efforts such as NYSC, quota system of admission into tertiary institutions and civil service and, of course, Obasanjo’s confiscation of regional financial, media and educational institutions, except digging ourselves out of the hole.

Now let us return to the crisis in the local councils. “Federalist practice is that local governments are creatures and subordinates of state governments and exist at their pleasure.” (Richard Sclar) And the United Nations concept of LGAs is “a political subdivision of a nation or a state in a federal system.”

Obasanjo and his military adventurers, aping the old imperial powers, institutionalised the local government as the third tier of government in 1976. He was to later declare with remorse, “When in 1976, we brought in Local Government Reforms, it was meant to be the third tier of the Government, and not meant to be subjected to the whims and caprices of any other government.”

They ignored the fact that the states are not supposed to be appendages of the central government but coordinates, operating on the basis of a constitution which allocates power to both tiers of government.

Not much thought went into Obasanjo’s decision. Out of self- deceit, we even refused to learn from the experience of India, one of the multicultural societies where the idea of local government as third tier of government flourished since 1992 when they started operating two very distinct forms: Urban localities, covered in the 74th amendment to the Constitution, established Municipalities that derive their powers from the individual state governments; and the other where the powers of rural localities have been formalised under the panchayati raj system, under the 73rd amendment to the Constitution.

While the 1950 and the 1966 Local Administration system inherited by our military adventurers stemmed from the 1947 policy thrust of the last colonial Secretary of State, Lord Creech-Jones, which stated that “the key to resolving the problems of African administration lay in the development of an efficient and democratic local government that is close to the people,” Obasanjo’s third tier of government was built on nothing.

This was why most people believe Obasanjo’s 1966 Local Government reform was designed not for grassroots development but to share the resources of more resourceful states among less resourceful states to support what many have described as Obasanjo’s ‘fake nationalism,’ which finds expression in forcing Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities at different levels of cultural development to operate at the same level, which in itself is an aberration in federalism.

Obasanjo’s political opponents believe he was not an independent arbiter in 1976 as evidence abounds to show he was anxious to please the north that allowed him to be in power following the assassination of Murtala Mohammed.

For instance, during the 1957 constitutional review, there were 12 provinces in the north and 12 in the south (or 15 if you add Oyo, divided into two in 1934, and the two southern Cameroon provinces which later joined Cameroon after a referendum.

Obasanjo was part of Gowon’s administration that created a 12-state structure ‘without ‘rhythm or rhyme,’ second-in-command to Murtala Mohammed that turned the country into a 19-state structure, just as he had influence on Babangida that took the states to thirty. Obasanjo is perhaps the only one who can explain why we today have 19 states for the north and 17 for the south.

Similarly, in 1979, there were 301 LGAs in the country; but in the never discussed 1999 constitution, which became operational under Obasanjo, there were 774 LGAs named, with 413 councils for the north and 355 for the south.

Obasanjo started the transfer of state residual functions to the central government by amending Decree 13 of 1970 and Decree 9 of 1971, and this was to lead to other decrees that finally increased the legislative list from 45 in 1960 to 68 in the 1999 constitution.

Those Obasanjo used to foist the American variant of federalism, with a strong centre just to promote his fake nationalism, Chief Rotimi Williams and Professor Nwabueze, regretted and apologised for shortchanging Nigerians before their death. And coming under the aegis of ‘the Patriots,’ they vigorously campaigned for the reduction of the unwieldy and unviable 36 states into six geopolitical zones.

President Tinubu, who understands our crisis of nation building, perhaps more than any of his predecessors, has started by making the six geopolitical zones economic development areas. But the ultimate goal will be to convert them to political administrative centres with the support of the National Assembly, if they are to meet the challenges of immigrant killer herdsmen, banditry, out-of-school children and ravaging poverty.

With increased revenue accruing to states and LGAs from the federation account following the fuel subsidy removal, President Tinubu is, no doubt, anxious to ensure his Renewed Hope Agenda reflects positively on the lives of the people in the rural areas. This perhaps explains why he went to secure the Supreme Court judgment to “compel the 36 states to grant full autonomy to local governments in their states, prohibits state governors from unilateral, arbitrary and unlawful dissolution of democratically elected local government leaders for local governments, and restrains the governors from spending and tampering with funds released from the federation accounts for the benefits of the LGAs when no democratically elected local government system is put in place in the states.”

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Nigerians have identified with the president’s judicial victory. But I am sure he understands it was a pyrrhic victory. That was why on Jan 2, 2025, while receiving members of the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) at his Ikoyi residence, he admitted the Federal Government cannot take local government away from state governments and called for stronger collaboration between the federal and state governments to address pressing challenges, including local government autonomy, agricultural productivity, and currency stability

I am sure the president remembers he took the Obasanjo government to court where he secured judgment declaring that local governments could not have financial autonomy because they are not federating units of the federation.

But in the end, the president, no doubt, understands that the issue of local governments is political. He should work through the National Assembly to see how to cede the current unviable arbitrarily created LGAs to the states who will decide what to do with them. With 68 items on the exclusive list, the federal government has more than enough to chew.

Instead of replicating state Leviathans at the local level through financial autonomy, whatever is meant for the third tier of government, which in any case belongs to the states, should be channeled through the states that are better positioned to appreciate their immediate needs.

Events in the last one year have proved that the local government is an integral part of the state; and attempting to separate them from each other will be like trying to cut off the umbilical cord of a foetus from the mother.

Finally, much as we may demonise the governors, we have no reason to believe that dysfunctional Abuja that mismanaged the nation’s resources through massive stealing in the years of abundance (1999-2015), and brought the nation to its knees between 2015 and 2023 as a result of incompetence, is the messiah the LGAs need.

June 3, 2025
Courageous at two

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT) celebrated the second anniversary of his administration on May 29th, and he had a lot to brag about, even though his political enemies tried to dampen his enthusiasm. A neophyte president on May 29th, 2023, PBAT exhibited the courage of a well-entrenched president, and slayed the economic monster of fuel subsidy and multiple exchange windows. Expectedly, the impact of that economic policy has been far-reaching, which perhaps explains why PBAT’s predecessors were afraid to slay that dragon.

PBAT courageously released a thunder at his inaugural, and the sound has travelled as far as other countries in West Africa. Fuel subsidy is gone, he said, and the immediate impact was an unprecedented inflationary pressure on goods and services. From a worrisome headline inflation rate of about 21.34 percent as at December 2022, according to one account, it ran up to 33.9 by June 2024. To put it in perspective, the average rate of inflation for goods from March 2021 to July 2022 averaged 9.2 percent in the PCE price index.

Comparatively, over the two decades before Covid19, being 1999 to 2019, the inflationary pressure had averaged 0.4 percent. But the inflationary rate for 2020 was 13.25 percent, an increase of 1.85 percent. It went up to 16.95 percent, in 2021, a 3.71 percent increase. By 2022, it hit 24.66 percent, a 5.8 percent increase. By December 2023, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, the headline inflation rate increased to 28.92 percent. From there it jumped to 34.19 percent by June 2024.

While many, especially those who never believed in the wisdom of the removal of fuel subsidy, may expect that by the second anniversary of PBAT’s administration, the headline inflation would be chasing the 50 percent mark, the inflationary pressure has done an about-turn. By March 2024, the headline inflation eased to 24.23 percent, and by April 2025, it further eased to 23.71 percent. With the current economic trajectory, and the apparent improvement in the macroeconomic indices, there is the chance that the headline inflation will continue to ease.

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The latest data on GDP shows a growth rate of 3.84 percent, the unemployment rate dropping to 4.3 percent, a positive balance of trade, a stable interest rate and easing of inflation. So, the PBAT administration has every reason to be upbeat at its second anniversary with respect to macroeconomic indicators. Interestingly, as the national economic indicators are rebounding, the sub-nationals are also doing better than the early days after the bold economic reforms were initiated. Many states in the federation are signing the Hallelujah Chorus for the Tinubu administration.

A news source indicates that many states in the country are paying down their debts. According to a report, Delta has reduced its debt by over 50 percent, having repaid N265.83 billion out of N465.4 billion. Jigawa paid N41.8 billion out of N43.13 billion, which is about 96 percent of the debt. Ondo reportedly paid N61.6 billion out of N74 billion, amounting to about 82 percent of the debt owed by the state. Without doubt, the improved capacities of states is an outcome of more resources received by the states from the federation account.

According to the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) disbursed an unprecedented N15.26 trillion to federal, states and local governments in 2024. The report indicated that the increase in revenue is attributable to sustained fiscal reform policies of the Federal Government, particularly the removal of fuel subsidy and the unification of the foreign exchange window. It is interesting that many states now engage in massive infrastructural development without resorting to the capital market as in the past.

A breakdown showed that states recorded the highest percentage increase of 62 percent, from N3.58 trillion to N5.81 trillion. The local governments had a 47 percent increase. The Federal Government had a modest increase of 24 percent from N3.99 trillion in 2023 to N4.95 trillion in 2024. The report also indicated that FAAC allocation increased from N9.18 trillion in 2022 to N10.9 trillion in 2023, and N15.26 trillion in 2024.

The PBAT administration, despite the initial vehement opposition, is working hard on tax reforms. The administration has indicated that the tax reforms would benefit businesses in the country, even as it expects that the efficiency the reform would wrought will increase the general income potentials for the country. The bill now awaiting the assent of the president is deemed the most comprehensive tax reform in decades. It is expected to streamline tax administration, simplify compliance, promote equity, and improve revenue generation across all tiers of government. We will see how the apprehension about over-taxation in the public space will be doused when the new tax law kicks in.

The Tinubu administration has also engaged in significant infrastructure development within the two years of its life. The flagship, the Lagos to Calabar coastal highway, is bold, positively disruptive and unprecedented. Cutting across Ogun, Ondo, Delta, Edo, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states, that highway, when completed, will significantly change the economic fortunes of the affected states. The Lagos end of the highway has, however, left many property owners affected by the development weeping and gnashing their teeth. It is hoped that adequate compensation would be paid to those whose properties were affected.

Another challenge which the administration must address is the impact of its economic reforms on the poor and the vulnerable. The challenge, however, is that a federal bureaucracy is not close enough to determine those who actually need the stipends it shares. The result, as always, is that the bureaucracy takes a higher share of the available resources than what actually gets to the downtrodden. The statistics about the level of poverty in Nigeria is scary. The World Bank projects that over 54 percent of Nigerians will be living in poverty in 2025, and within that,

75.5 percent of rural dwellers live below the poverty line.

As should be obvious, poverty is a significant contributor to insecurity in Nigeria. The PBAT administration must begin to execute policies that would significantly reduce poverty where it is most prevalent in the country. Northern leaders should be persuaded to discard the old tactics of keeping their population uneducated and uninformed, some argue, for political reasons. The World Bank report indicated that 15 out of the 17 states with poverty rates above the national level are in the northern part of the country. It says that Sokoto and Taraba states have the highest poverty headcount ratio at 87.8 percent.

No doubt, the Tinubu administration has taken bold and drastic measures to return Nigeria to a path of sustainable growth. The old tactics of subsidising fuel and borrowing to sustain and stabilise the value of the naira were never sustainable.

June 3, 2025
Born-again Fubara?

It was “Hardball”, The Nation’s unsigned back-page column, that first flagged the new Fubara, in “Fubara comes of age” (May 16).

Far from the threaten-first, think-later cruise of his pre-suspension days, embattled Rivers Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, was sounding radically different: more conciliatory, less combative.

He warned his supporters, who even at the event, had their victimhood orchestra blaring at its loudest decibel to, for once, swallow the chill pill. “Oshobay” — no-retreat-no-surrender — he warned, could be counter-productive.

He told them to bawl less and think more. Between tactical din and strategic quiet, Fubara just voted the loud quiet — and he picked no bones about it!

Lest anyone, he further warned, goes blabbing after the event that wily Fubara begs in the day but plots in the night! Enough of “Oshobay”!

Now, is this a born-again Fubara?

No insulting of judges in hallowed courts of justices? No traducement of the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and his troopers, over a local government poll, later declared null and void? No colourful signals to “youths” — with raucous cheers — to await instructions at the right time, even as Rivers was about to go up in smoke?

Indeed, is this Fubara born-again?

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“Hardball” really played hard ball with devastating lexis, over the collapse of that rash tactic: “Fubara has eaten crow. Clark is gone to meet his maker. ‘Oshobay’ is in the morgue”! A stinging satire never sounded more biting!

The irony though was that old man Edwin Clark, in whose sweet memory that occasion was forged, was the unfazed champion of “Oshobay”.

The radical old man, even at his “departure lounge”, never tired of pushing hot Ijaw nationalism and frothy Fubara exceptionalism: nativist twin-pillars to propel the governor to victory, despite his clear lack of “structure” — beyond cunning conflict entrepreneurs edging him on for own hot bucks; and sundry hustlers goading the governor to buck the Wike boat, for own sinecures!

The thunder from Delta barked and quaked: the presidential peace papers were infra dig for the Rivers governor. By virtue of his all-mighty office, he must hold all of the aces!

But now? The rage is gone. Clark is dead. All is quiet on the Delta front. And Fubara, on the Rivers front, finds himself holding the short end of the political stick!

A power tale is never more sobering! The surrender, never more craven and shattering — in any case, to Fubara’s gung-ho supporters! Still, a retreat, in the face of cold reality, would appear harsh common sense.

That harsh reality comes clearly across as Fubara marks his “second year” in office, though in exile! A four-year term could now be short by six months. Still, half-bread is better than none!

That’s the clear message from the Fubara camp, with the governor himself playing the loud messenger-in-chief. And NBA, that hitherto played to the gallery on the emergency question, is funereally mum!

Unlike the dead Clark thunder that blasted the Abuja peace accord and torched the Rivers emergency declaration papers, the living but wiser Fubara is praising the president to high heavens, as his second-year message.

The governor’s chief of staff, who hitherto had threatened a fight-to-finish with the Wike camp, is content with happy ads about the “old” times of halcyon power, set to return in less than six months!

It’s another cruel reality check, that further decries the old tactics, without necessarily saying so. Between the Wike and Fubara camps, it’s fresh clamour for presidential adoration!

Still, both sights are set on different spots: Fubara, to at least regain lost diadem. Wike, to fully control the 2027 Rivers sweepstakes. President Bola Tinubu appears in the roaring vortex of both.

Common sense demands that he be courted — and so be it, from both camps!

So, if Fubara, who virtually declared, at the Clark tribute, that his “soul” had departed the Rivers State House, now says he wants new peace and amity with his “Oga” — read Nyesom Wike — then you know why!

Both may yet get what they crave in the very short term: Fubara’s return to office after six months, or even less, if the armistice and peace terms are fast firmed up.

As Fubara is pushing new conciliation — and Wike too, claiming he never fought his “boy”: only the crass opportunists that led him astray — Fubara could return to office under a tight Wike leash.

It’s left to the President: to whom both camps swear fealty; and other chefs in the peace kitchen — blessed are the peace makers! — to cook honourable and non-humiliating peace.

Good luck on that though, for Wike never resists a canter and gallop of triumph, though that might bury the vanquished in the dust! But who cares?

Yet, honourable peace is imperative.

Let it not be the Rivers equivalent of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-1933), chafing from the harsh terms of the Treaty of Varsailles, only to breed Hitler. Hitler and killer gang seized a craven German surrender in War War 1 (1914-1918), to lunch a worse Armageddon in World War 2 (1939-1945)!

It now might appear all quiet on the Rivers front. But there is enough tinder lying around, like dry thatch in the harmattan, to convulse the place, with any careless move!

Which makes this counsel to bear repeating: as Fubara re-shapes self as peacenik, gentle as a dove, Wike too should learn to be less abrasive and belligerent.

But even with both coming to party with their best behaviour, the crunch will come with second-term sweepstakes. Fubara should not kid himself: the Wike “structure” can’t trust him with power again.

Neither should Wike too suffer any illusion: Fubara would grab a possible second term, within or without Wike’s structure — not after losing six months from his first.

Everyone waits — holding their breaths — as the two friends-turned-fiends, navigate this testy juncture. Will fiends yet turn friends again? Or would it be “To your tent, o Rivers”? Time will tell!

But the auguries are hardly good. As President Bola Tinubu works hard at changing the conventional path to the presidency, amid a ferocious gang-up by Atiku-led “me-too” ensemble, Rivers could well become a veritable battle ground.

The old fiefdom of Peter Odili is carved into three: under Wike, Fubara and Rotimi Amaechi, with General Peter himself all but a bemused spectator! He backed a wrong horse in Fubara!

Who carries the day? Will Fubara, junked by the Wike camp, team up with the Atiku/ Amaechi forces, to grit out who owns the land? We wait!

June 3, 2025
Linking insecurity to 2027 polls

The link between rising insecurity in the country and 2027 general elections dominated deliberations of the Senate during its sitting last Wednesday. A motion of urgent importance on the many cases of Boko Haram and armed banditry sponsored by Shuaibu Isa Lau, Taraba North, provided the platform for senators to reasonably suspect a link exists between the escalating insecurity and the coming national elections.

Senators Sunday Karimi and Danguma Goje did not see the upsurge in insecurity as mere coincidence. They would rather have the Federal Government look deeper into the rising incidents of Boko Haram upsurge ahead of the 2027 elections, especially as they bear the trademark of events of the 2015 polls.

Senator Karimi, while noting there were cases before the 2015 elections where some individuals threatened violence in case they lost at the polls, lamented that in the last two weeks, several individuals from his district had been kidnapped. “We must ask why? What is the motive behind this? What do they stand to gain? he further asked.

“We saw similar signs before the 2015 elections where some individuals prepared for violence in case they lost at the polls. The same pattern appears to be emerging now as we approach the 2027 elections. These attacks may not be random; they may be coordinated efforts by those who feel they are losing political relevance and seek to plunge the country into chaos as a strategy to regain power by force,” Karimi further noted. He wants these people unmasked and held accountable.

Goje supported the view that the rising cases of violence across the country are not just isolated incidents. “We need to ask questions: Why now? Why the sudden surge in violence?” He called for deeper investigations to determine whether these incidents are linked to the political build up to the 2027 elections.

The suspicion by senators of a nexus between the current upsurge in insecurity and the build up to the 2027 elections is on point. It fits into the pattern of the puzzles that surrounded the emergence of the Boko Haram insurgency and the lethal proportions its activities assumed as the 2015 elections approached. If that experience offers any lesson, then the reoccurrence of similar trends as the 2027 national elections draw closer is bound to raise eyebrows. So, the link which the senators sought to establish between events of the two elections can neither be dismissed with a wave of the hand nor wished away. They present regularities that evoke reasonable suspicion that should compel serious inquisition.

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Writing in this column last April under the title: “Insecurity and Partisan politics,” I had raised the question as to whether there is a link between the escalating insecurity in the country and the quest by politicians for power? It was also observed that the same question featured prominently when the Boko Haram insurgency reared its ugly head and assumed monstrous dimensions as the 2015 elections approached. The article had also observed that the link is “being talked about even in hushed tones as the momentum of the 2027 elections gathers.”

The write-up followed resumed killings in Plateau, Benue and Taraba states by suspected herdsmen, and coordinated attacks by the Boko Haram insurgents in parts of north east. Apart from the similarity in the manner of rising attacks, the article also noted the coincidence that in 2015 Jonathan, a southerner, was at the helm of affairs when Boko Haram suddenly raised the bar of insecurity while now, Bola Tinubu, a southerner, is the current president.

Why insecurity rises when a southern president is about to run for another election is another link worthy of serious investigation. The way it is resolved may well provide a veritable lead to unveiling the motive behind the rising insecurity as elections approach; its motive, sponsors and collaborators.

The matter has resonated with the position of the senators. Maybe it now offers the needed opportunity to re-examine the puzzles evident in the discordant tunes from the north at the budding stages of the Boko Haram insurgency on what the fight against it really represented.

Then, a former governor of Adamawa State, Muritala Nyako, had told a meeting of northern governors of the Federal Government’s alleged complicity in the saga, even as he claimed that security officials were passing information to help the terrorists in their deadly operations. He had also alleged that the motive for the Boko Haram insurgency was to reduce the voting population of the north east in the 2015 elections and subsequent ones, and keep the region perpetually underdeveloped.

Nyako was reported to have repeated the same allegations at a meeting of 12 northern governors with US government officials in Washington DC. The US meeting was organised by the US government, through its Institute of Peace, to explore how Americans can work with state governments in the north to address the Boko Haram insurgency and underlying under-development challenges.

The claim that Boko Haram was contrived to reduce the voting population of the north in the 2015 elections spoke of the same political link. The only difference is that the blame was laid at the doorsteps of the Jonathan regime. But suspicion of political sponsorship and collaboration with the insurgents by some northern politicians was also evident from the high level of mass abduction of school children in controversial circumstances without any trace.

The blame game they engendered, and the manner some of the school children were later ferried back without any trace of where they were taken to, raised suspicion of conspiracy rooted in the then coming national elections.

Insecurity had such prominence that it became an election campaign issue. It became an issue of blackmail as northern governors held former president Jonathan squarely responsible for the upsurge. Suicide bomb attacks on churches and other public buildings provoked so much anger against the government in power then that its loss in the coming election was quite predictable.

But this conspiracy dimension was not lost on Jonathan. He was later to demonstrate the enormity of the challenge when he disclosed there were Boko Haram sympathisers in his cabinet, at the national assembly and within the judiciary.

Boko Haram backers and sympathisers are “in the executive arm of the government; some of them are in the parliament/legislative arm of the government while some are in the judicial arm. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies,” Jonathan lamented.

Jonathan was seemingly helpless in confronting the dangerous shape Boko Haram had assumed within the theatres of war and in government circles. Ironically, he was handicapped in dealing with the complexities of the matter, given that Boko Haram enablers, sympathisers and collaborators could be found within the three arms of the government and among the security forces. It was a delicate situation; so difficult to pinpoint those that have nothing to do with the insurgents. Then, it appeared all was fair in war because the objective was to see that administration out by every available means during the polls. And it came to pass. But the monsters are still lying in wait.

When Buhari took over as president, hopes were high that he had a solution to the insurgency, given his military background and election promises to diminish the potency of the insurgents within a few months. After a few months in office, he gleefully told the nation that he had won the war against Boko Haram insurgency.

In his view, Boko Haram had been so diminished that it could not muster sufficient force and capability to attack military formations. But many knew that Buhari’s claims were in utter variance with facts on the ground. His bogus claims drew caution from the outside world as he was reminded that insurgency is so rooted and complex that it is difficult to dismantle in the manner Buhari had presented.

It did not take long before Boko Haram put a lie to his claims. It has since continued to mount serious attacks against our security forces with no signs of either retreating or surrendering. The fact that its attacks have resumed in such a manner that compelled senators to call for serious investigation of the resurgence of Boko Haram attacks ahead of the 2027 elections says all about the potency of the insurgent group.

Just last week, Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State alleged that Boko Haram has “informants and collaborators within the Nigerian armed forces, within the politicians and within the communities.” These links are nothing new. Their motive? Sadly, despite the weight of information on collaborators and sponsors of terrorism, no substantial effort has been made to unmask and bring the full weight of the law against them.

There are now four splinter groups from Boko Haram terrorising society. The message in that spread should be instructive. What has been lacking has been the needed political will to deal with the enablers of the cascading terrorism. Until then, the monsters the politicians created will continue to turn around and haunt them.

June 2, 2025
Naysayers at two

The clamour will not end. The fierce malice burns. The rage of jealousies, too.

But at two, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu does not need to convince the doubters. If his work does not, he does not need to avoid his sleep.

Those who are angry for no just cause are entitled to their anger. Those who are deaf to their hard-of- hearing. Those blind to their unseeing eyes.

It is like what essayist and philosopher Francis Bacon says to those who deny God. “God never wrought miracles to convince atheism,” crooned the thinker, “because his ordinary works convince it. It is true that a little philosophy inclineth men’s minds to atheism.”

But Sunny Ade, in one of his immortal songs, sang A sese bere ni o/ eti won aya/ to ba ya/ won a fe ran/ ti won ba ran a wa di.

Translation: “We have just begun/ their eardrums will tear/ once torn, they will sew it back, when they sew it back, it will be blocked.” The minstrel was lamenting compulsive ignorance, the tenacity of hubris masked as a cause.

So, if they are saying the president brought hardship on the people, it is not the work of anyone to teach them that the president inherited an economy gasping for breath. They know. The figures were released. They cannot say they did not know that we were mired in ways and means, that is, printing money for survival.

We were printing ourselves not into debt, but into oblivion. If they did not know, it is a pity they did not hear of the about N30 trillion hole we had dug. They knew we owed IMF loans. We owed billions to the airlines. We owed subnational debts in the trillions.

If they know and close their lips, we are no gods to restore a voice to them. If they do not know that all those burdens are history, I am not about to begin a history lesson. Journalism of the robust kind has said it over and over with facts and figures. Just like Poet Birago Diop wrote, “if we tell gently, gently, all that we shall one day have to tell…” The critics and uproarious commentators have heard it over the past two years.

If they did not like the Lagos-Calabar Superhighway, what do they say today? They said it was a scam. It was a strategy for larceny. It was not going to happen. The president opened 30 kilometres. They cannot reverse it, but they still would not accept it. Nothing anyone can do about that. It is fait accompli. At two, he opened about a dozen roads for Nigerians. So much for crybabies.

What about agriculture, and the work of Pate for medicine or the loans for over half a million students and credit for over 80k poor entrepreneurs? What of the investor confidence that has made the stock market swagger or the rise of the reserves from $3 billion to over $23 billion? The states are flush like never in the past decade, ask Jigawa that paid off 90 percent of its debt or Delta that paid off half of its debt of over N200 billion under the great Sheriff Oborevwori. See Lithium in Kaduna and sprawls of farms in Niger, Kebbi and Kaduna states. If it is not hope, they can hug despair.

They want to deny that progress is afoot on security. They forget Birnin Gwari in Kaduna where a market lay like a corpse for a decade; border onslaughts in Katsina, the persistence of fear and trembling Zamfara, parts of Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger. They forget that an insurgent group threatened from Sokoto called Lukarawa. When last did we hear of them? The commentators and gadflies often glad at faults have said nothing of the long list of bandit kingpins that have been eliminated. This page listed quite a number of them.

It is not my duty to teach critics how to think. But at least I cannot give them eyes, if they cannot see. I cannot give them ears if they cannot hear.

But I will have, like others, to remind them of what they know. To a philosopher like Socrates, he may be frustrated by that ilk of men. The Greek philosopher argues that we know a lot, and that we forget all we know, and we have to nudge the knowledge out with questions. It is called the Socratic Method. Hence the man said, “if I am the wisest man alive it is because I know nothing.” He says this in humility but he says our senses deceive us, and that we have to dig into our forgotten well to know that we know.

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Maybe that is the problem with these critics. They are, however, too cocky. Unlike Socrates, they cannot admit that they know nothing. Maybe they know, or their prejudices and hatred for one man have genuinely blinded them to what is before them.

I was with the president recently, and I discussed IMF with him. He said he had no discussions with IMF. I had said earlier on this page that his policies may have received IMF endorsement but it was a coincidence of policy, not obedience of thought. He confirmed that to me. It was then he said “ways and means, $7 billion debts and others gone.”

The stinger is inflation. But the cost of food was soaring when there were ebi npawa cries. Then a bag of rice was over N100k and tomato, onions, garri, etc were hitting the roofs. The prices have not exactly touched the earth, but they are tracking down. Rice now sells for about half the price now. I met a fellow at Asaba a few days ago who said this was the first time in his lifetime that a price would drop down after a jump.

We are seeing it in another core inflation index: fuel. Dangote has announced consistent drops in fuel price. The only time it jerked up again was when the naira-for-crude policy expired. But it was renewed to hope. That idea is genius. Do you think the men the critics brandish can think like that? Atiku? No. Obi? Nada.

The Financial Times of London wrote a sunny editorial on Tinubu’s performance on the economy. But his naysayers are not seeing it. However, when, in the past, the western press slammed him, they advertised it. They became friends of IMF that they had bedeviled. IMF is an angel now, a devil now. Go figure.

The naira is not where we want it but it has survived its topsy-turvy hour when men feared it would outride N2000 to a dollar. “I still think the naira is undervalued,” the president told me. I also spoke about the penchant of corporate Nigeria to raise prices when food was coming down, and he said in reference to bank charges, that “Cardoso will handle it.”

What do the critics say about the loans to indigent students? They say nothing. Over half a million students are getting it. Is that not intervention? Over 83k Nigerians are taking advantage of credit schemes. It has barely started.

But some are angry. At the bottom are partisan and ethnic caterwauling. They would not accept it even if President Tinubu paved all roads gold in the country. The bitterness of 2023, the fear of the man in Aso Rock, has blinded them to whatever good comes out of his Israel. Last year, when I delivered a lecture at the Trinity University, a number of the students asked if the government could extend the student loans scheme to the private universities. I did not have any answer for them, other than that private universities are for those who have the money to pay. But the public university is for the very poor. My answer may be logical, but it ran foul of their sentiment.

“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see but do not see,” wrote Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago in his novel Blindness. In that book, a whole town turns blind, and they are lost in the paradise of ignorance of the world around them. He shows the true conscience is the eye.

When you have a bad conscience, you see bad things. Civilisations have applauded bad things for ages. Democracies have voted out democracy. They saw slavery and thanked God for it. Killed twins and worshipped heaven for it. Forbade women to be circumcised. Women should not go to school. Children who ate eggs would be thieves. Colonialism was good for Africa. Hitler was good for Germans. Today, immigrants are not good for America. Beware of wise men when they are foolish. John Stuart Mill calls it the “foolish majority.”

In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s hero goes to war and comes home triumphant but the masses do not accept their liberation until he shows them his battle scar. Evidence is not always enough. A deranged elite can con a people to believe a lie, like they did to the poor hero Coriolanus. Hence Apostle Paul warned that God would send “strong delusion” to a stubborn people so that they can believe a lie as he did to Pharoah.

Those who do not believe in what is before their eyes and sounding in their ears ought to read Diop’s line, “If we tell gently, gently all that we shall one day have to tell…”

June 2, 2025
In search of the good cardinal

Cardinal John Onaiyekan has taken it upon himself to serve as a critic, a reverend without reverence, and he did it again recently. The problem with some clerics of his ilk is that they wear the toga of piety and belch out folly. He is playing to the gallery for the gullible.

If he says Nigerians are going through poverty, has he addressed the facts that prices are coming down and he should encourage that pattern rather than holler?

Has he noted that his own candidate also agreed that we should remove fuel subsidies and marry exchange rate windows?

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Does he, in his hoopla, explain that we were in a quagmire before those policies? Does he explain that the same president has paid off IMF loans, given scholarships to poor students and credit to small business folks? Has he diagnosed the agricultural policies?

Does he know that the states are flush with money now that even Jigawa has paid off 90 percent of its loans?

Is he a cleric without context in his thoughts? Men like the good cardinal should follow the contents of scripture about learning, especially the one that says, “for a soul to be without knowledge, it is not good.”

June 2, 2025